Esther McCoy Irving Gill 1870-1936 Five California Architects, 1960, Reprinted in Marvin Rand Irving J. Gill: Architect 1870-1936, Gibbs Smith, Publisher: Salt Lake City, UT, Design, Ahde Lahti; Photographs, Marvin Rand, 2006, 238 pp., pp. 219-227, 2006a, 1916, 1908, 1907, 1904. 1893, 1890, 1870
"After his success in the East, Gill returned to San Diego to find himself much sought after at home. In 1904 he designed a Christian Science Church, four residences and a theater; he also built a house for himself that year.
"He was still the young eclectic working mainly in brick and half-timbered style. In his own house, and in others he built, in 1905, he began to find his direction. But it was not until after 1906, when his partnership with Hebbard ended, that he was on sure ground.
"In the meantime his interiors had already developed in the direction of elimination and simplification typical of his mature work.
"The redwood was used in dimensions large enough to register the nature of the wood, often 12-inch boards. Moldings were 2 by 3/4-inch stock with sanded edges. Balustrades were made of square or rectangular sticking, a practice Gill continued up through the Dodge house of 1916. The only finish given the redwood was a sanding and hand polishing. He (p. 221) considered it a sacrilege tro use oil, stain, or even wax on redwood. In the Christian Science Church he omitted moldings entirely, although they were added later "to give a finish touch." On the third floor of the Marston House, he tried out doors made of five pieces of redwood, a step in the direction of his slab doors of 1907. He used magnesite in bathrooms and kitchens, and designed and cast in brass the hardware for all his buildings.
"He was impatient with the infinite number of parts in a house; the wood frame seemed to him to be something hooked together, and he set himself to the business of simplifying structure, of eliminating, and making one piece do the work of ten, According to his nephew, "He was always trying to do something better. A window had 24 parts, and he designed one with four; then he found out the cost was the same. He looked for ways to apply plaster in his half-timbered houses to prevent it from shrinking away from the wood. He never stopped. He was never satisfied."
"When he built a minimum house for himself in 1904, he experimented with structure. For some of the interior walls he tried out 1 by 4-inch studs, 4 inches apart, over which he placed diagonal lathing and plaster. The finished walls were 3 inches thick, and they tested equal to the 2 by 4-inch studs 16 inches on center, which made a 5 1/2 inch wall. Plaster filled the openings between the 1 by 4-inch studs, so there was no spaces to act as fire flues.
"Pleased with his experiments, Gill used the system for exterior walls and partitions in a house he designed in 1905 for Miss Alice Lee, the first of three commissions he undertook for her. The house was significant for another reason. The exterior was entirely of stucco, the form more compact, and the roof lower in pitch. Although he continued to design a few houses in half-timbered style, and did two shingled ones in 1906, he was moving toward the adobe forms of the mission builders, who had neither the time nor the tools to be other than frank.
"Between the half-timbered and shingle houses and the ultimate ones in concrete, there were a number between 1906 and 1912 that showed the influence of the Prairie style in their strong horizontal lines and broad sheltering roofs.
"At a time when houses were dim, Gill's were invariably bright. This came from the direct approach of the Chicago school to lighting office buildings. Sullivan's three-division window, with fixed glass in the center and an operating pane on each side, was typical of Gill's design.
"By 1907, after ten years in California, he began to find what he was looking for. His changes in style always followed closely his changes in systems of construction. In the Melvill Klauber and Homer Laughlin houses of that year he used concrete and hollow tile and furred out the interior walls. The tile was an excellent insulating material, and as the concrete did not shrink away from it there was less possibility of cracks.
"The Klauber house had a gable roof with a slight Janpanese curve in the pitch, while the roof of the Laughlin house was low and covered with tiles. Another change came in the interiors of the Laughlin house, where a minimum of wood was used. For about eight years, Gill had coved his kitchen and bathroom walls into concrete floors; in the Laughlin house he carried this treatment throughout the entire house.
"His inventiveness was applied to more than structure. A garbage disposal in the kitchen dropped garbage to an incinerator in the basement; an outlet for a vacuum cleaner in each room carried dust to the furnace in the basement through a pipe in the wall. The ice box in the kitchen could be opened from outside the house so it was unnecessary for the delivery man to enter the kitchen; milk could also be delivered through a slot. In the garage an automatic car washing device sprayed the car's entire surface; and a mail box flush with the front door emptied mail inside the house.
" . . .
"Gill summed up his practices in The Craftsman, May, 1916: "In California we have long been experimenting with the idea of producing a perfectly sanitary, labor-saving house, one where the maximum of comfort may be had with the minimum of drudgery. In the recent houses that I have built , the walls are finished flush with the casings and the line where the wall joins the flooring is slightly rounded. so that it forms one continuous piece with no place for dust to enter or to lodge, or crack for vermin of any kind to exist. There is no molding for pictures, plates or chairs, no baseboard, paneling or wainscoting to catch and hold the dust. The doors are single slabs of hand-polished mahogany swung on invisible hinges or else made so that they slide into the wall. In some of the houses all windows and door frames are of steel."
"His sinks were set in magnesite, which was cast in one piece with the walls, and all the corners rounded, "so not a particle of grease or dirt can lodgte, or dampness collect and become unwholesome. The bath tubs are boxed and covered with magnesite up to the porcelain."
"Superficially Gill might well have been classed as a rationalist, but his approach to work was that of the humanist. His passionate interest in sanitation and light was the basis for much of his simplification. His memory of his mother's inconvenient kitchen led him to devise ways to lighten the tasks in the home.
"Indeed his houses were planned around women. Frederick Gutheim, architectural historian, said, "He spoke often of the practical details of housework, of the obligations of a hostess, of the house as a place for individual creative expression and activities, including gardening." In his low cost house he wanted a tree in every back yard so that a baby's basket could be hung from a limb.